Views: Discover each other

Quote: For centuries, China paid dearly for its determination to
close itself off from the outside world. Today, with China emerging as
a more global power economically and diplomatically, Americans need to
learn for the first time how Chinese view the world.


A Chinese immigrant discovers America
By YIYUN LI

Posted Monday, Apr. 17, 2006
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1184350,00.html

This article originally appeared in the April 24the issue of TIME Asia

My earliest encounter with America was through a column titled
"Communism is Good, Capitalism is Bad" in the Young Pioneers Weekly, a
newspaper I read avidly from age 7 to 12. The column ran two stories
side by side, one taking place in China and one in America, with
similar scenarios: an old man getting sick, say, or a flood devouring
a town. The Chinese tales ended happily, as fairy tales do; the
American ones showed a renjian diyu, a hell in real life.

Before I left China for the U.S. in 1996, at age 24, my sister made me
watch a rerun of Baywatch so I'd be better prepared for life in my new
country. But my impression of Americans as proud-bodied beauties with
gleaming smiles was shattered soon after I landed. Baywatch, it turned
out, was as distant from reality as the stories in my childhood
newspaper.

In the years that followed, I would have to develop a more nuanced
view of America. What do I make of it, then, after living there for
more than a decade? A few years ago, I taught a composition class at a
college in Iowa. Among my students were an immigrant from Guatemala,
an Indian who grew up in London, a Japanese-American out of North
Carolina, a Philippine-Chinese-American, and several very blond
students from the American heartland, including a white supremacist
who defended her family's racism in front of the class. This
extraordinary mix of students strikes me as a perfect representation
of America, a land where a boy raised at the back of an Indian grocery
store in London easily started a friendship with a boy from Morning
Sun, Iowa, population 872.

Yet there was also a surprising sameness and insularity to my
students. When I assigned them an essay on fear, they wrote touchingly
but similarly of death and aging, depression and eating disorders.
Similar too was their lack of curiosity. When I asked them to list
five people they were curious about, most could not come up with
better answers than the jocks and girls they had crushes on, or
Britney Spears and Eminem.

To teach writing and literature in America is, to me, to teach my
students to be curious about people who are different from them.
Indeed, one of the great pleasures of my life in America has been to
befriend such a variety of others—from a woman raised as a Hasidic Jew
to a black Southerner who, until his 20s, had never eaten with a white
person. An openness to others is, of course, equally key for nations.
For centuries, China paid dearly for its determination to close itself
off from the outside world. Today, with China emerging as a more
global power economically and diplomatically, Americans need to learn
for the first time how Chinese view the world. It's never easy to
bridge such gaps—but as my American students and friends taught me,
life is infinitely richer if you try to do so.

Yiyun Li is author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and an
assistant professor at Mills College in Oakland, California


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